When her translation of the novel Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan from Chinese won the 2017 young adult/middle school literature award, Helen Wang wished to know more and asked David Jacobson, whose Are You An Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko received a 2016 honorable mention in the children’s literature category. Here is David’s response, which also appears at Chinese Books for Young Readers.

David: Thanks, Helen, for this opportunity. To be frank, I didn’t know much about the Freeman Book Awards either, when my publisher applied for consideration. That was in the winter of 2016, and we had just learned that a new Asia-related prize would be added to the slew of children’s book awards announced at the American Library Association’s annual mid-winter meeting. So, of course we applied…

In April, we received word that Are You an Echo? had received an honorable mention, so I did a little sleuthing online to find out more about the awards. In so doing, I discovered that the University of Washington’s East Asia Resource Room was about to hold a National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) seminar using my book as one of its teaching materials. So I contacted them and offered to introduce the book and answer questions, if they desired. They did, and I ended up teaching a seminar to about 25 elementary and secondary school teachers.

The NCTA aims to make a “permanent place for East Asia in K-12 classrooms in the United States.”

Which brings me to what I find so striking about my experience with the Freeman Award: the immediate connection it has helped me create with teachers who care about introducing Asia to their students. Besides the seminar last spring, NCTA also invited me to participate in two sessions at its upcoming summer institute (one about Echo and the other about the database of translated children’s books in Chinese, Japanese and Korean that we published here), and possibly an online webinar in the fall.

That, it turns out, is the essence of NCTA’s mission: to make a “permanent place for East Asia in K-12 classrooms in the United States,” according to Mary Hammond Bernson, who is both NCTA co-founder as well as the director of the East Asia Resource Center at UW, one of the seven national coordinating sites that make up NCTA.

Founded in 1988, NCTA’s principal vehicle for aiding teachers has been its teacher seminars; some 22,000 educators have participated to date. But a few years ago, it discovered that other organizations were recognizing and promoting international children’s books with prizes such as the South Asian Book Awards, but there were none for East and Southeast Asia.

“We are simply hoping to promote literature, as opposed to text books, that will interest K-12 students,” says Roberta Martin, a senior researcher at Columbia and also a co-founder of NCTA (Columbia is another of the national coordinating sites).

The awards are named for the Freeman family, whose foundation (the Freeman Foundation) funds both NCTA and the book prizes. For a colorful history of the Freeman family’s 100-year-long association with Asia, see this interview of Houghton Freeman.

The Freeman Book Awards are offered in two categories, children’s and young adult literature. Submission guidelines and instructions can be found here. This year’s deadline for books published in 2018 is August 31.